Hla Oo's Blog

I am a Burmese exile taking a near-permanent refuge in New York and Sydney. Here are my essays about Burma and anything else I feel like writing about. And posting the articles I like from selected sites. Bridging Burma to the world this Blog is more of a Politically-Oriented Literary Blog than a Plain News Blog or a Sophisticated Thoughts Blog.

Tuesday, September 26, 2017

Hindu refugees blame 'Rohingya
militants' for attacking them in Myanmar: Hindu refugees have pointed the
finger at Rohingya militants for attacking them in Myanmar when the ethnic
minority Rohingyas blame the country's army for killings, rapes, arsons and
lootings.

Around 500 Hindus have crossed the border into Bangladesh along with
over 436,000 Rohingya Muslims after fleeing conflicts in Buddhist-majority
Myanmar's Rakhine State since an army crackdown triggered by ARSO Rohingya
insurgent attacks on security forces on Aug 25.

The Hindu refugees have taken shelter
beside two temples at Ukhia in Cox's Bazar near the refugee camps for Rohingyas
at Kutupalong. On Saturday, police recovered the body of a Hindu refugee at a
canal in the area. The Hindus alleged Rohingyas murdered the man following a
dispute over money the Muslims took as loan back home in Myanmar.

Sunday, September 24, 2017

HONG KONG — Despite international
condemnation of Myanmar’s campaign of violence against the Rohingya people,
there have been few calls for a return to the sort of sanctions that were long
a part of the country’s relationship with the West.

After a Rohingya militant group attacked police outposts last month,
Myanmar’s military, along with vigilante groups, launched a crackdown in the
western state of Rakhine, triggering a refugee crisis that has sent more than
400,000 Rohingya (Bengali Muslims) fleeing to neighboring Bangladesh.

On Monday, Boris Johnson, Britain’s
foreign secretary, led a private discussion of the Rohingya crisis among
foreign ministers attending the United Nations General Assembly. Daw Aung San
Suu Kyi, the de facto head of Myanmar’s government, last week decided not to
attend the General Assembly, where she would probably have drawn a flood of
criticism.

Saturday, September 23, 2017

The Mighty Mathematician You’ve Never
Heard Of: Scientists are a famously anonymous lot, but few can match in the
depths of her perverse and unmerited obscurity the 20th-century mathematical
genius Amalie Noether. Albert Einstein called her the most “significant” and
“creative” female mathematician of all time, and others of her contemporaries
were inclined to drop the modification by sex.

She invented a theorem that united with magisterial concision two
conceptual pillars of physics: symmetry in nature and the universal laws of
conservation. Some consider Noether’s theorem, as it is now called, as
important as Einstein’s theory of relativity; it undergirds much of today’s
vanguard research in physics, including the hunt for the almighty Higgs boson.

Yet Noether herself remains utterly
unknown, not only to the general public, but to many members of the scientific
community as well. When Dave Goldberg, a physicist at Drexel University who has
written about her work, recently took a little “Noether poll” of several dozen
colleagues, students and online followers, he was taken aback by the results.
“Surprisingly few could say exactly who she was or why she was important,” he
said. “A few others knew her name but couldn’t recall what she’d done, and the
majority had never heard of her.”

The were welcomed by Lt-Gen Aung Kyaw Zaw of the Office of the
Commander-in-Chief (Army), the commander of Western Command, senior military
officers, Secretary of Rakhine State government U Tin Maung Swe, Minister for
Electricity, Industry and Transport U Aung Kyaw Zan and officials.

At the meeting hall of the Regional
Operation Command (ROC-Sittway) Headquarters in Sittway, the command commander in
recounting the terrorist attacks in Buthidaung/ Maungtaw region in August,
explained the beefing up of security operations in northern Rakhine State after
the occurrence of violent attacks in October 2016.

Thursday, September 21, 2017

Without publicly acknowledging the UK
government has unilaterally terminated the training agreement with Burmese Army
and sent all five trainee officers from Burmese army back to Burma. All five
Burmese army officers currently receiving British training are now waiting at
Burmese embassy in London for further instructions from the Army.

The Tatmadaw (Burmese Army) True News
Information Committee has issued a statement today (20 September 2017) saying
that it is making constant efforts to ensure amity and cooperation with armed
forces of neighbouring countries, regional countries and international
countries at a time when the country is exercising the multiparty democracy
system.

In an attempt to promote relation and
cooperation between armed forces of both countries, five officer trainees from
Myanmar Tatmadaw are undergoing training in the UK. The UK sends them back to
Myanmar as the UK’s Muslim parliamentarians (Most are Bangladesh-born) are calling for the suspension of
training course with regard to the incidents in Rakhine State.

Wednesday, September 20, 2017

BALUKHALI, Bangladesh — Nazir Hossain,
the imam of a village in far western Myanmar, gathered the faithful around him
after evening prayers last month. In a few hours, more than a dozen Arakan
Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) fighters from his village would strike a nearby
police post with an assortment of handmade weapons. The men needed their
cleric’s blessing.

“As imam, I encouraged them never to step back from their mission,” Mr.
Hossain recalled of his final words to the ethnic Rohingya militants. “I told
them that if they did not fight to the death, the military would come and kill
their families, their women and their children.”

They fought — joining an Aug. 25
assault by thousands of the group’s fighters against Myanmar’s security forces
— and the retaliation came down anyway. Since then, Myanmar’s troops and
vigilante mobs have unleashed a scorched-earth operation on Rohingya
populations in northern Rakhine State in Myanmar, sending hundreds of thousands
fleeing their homes in a campaign that the United Nations has called ethnic
cleansing.

Tuesday, September 19, 2017

(Two articles direct from The HRW & The HUFFPOST on 15 & 18 September
2017.)

HRW satelite image of a burning Bengali border village in Maungdaw District.

(Dhaka) – The Burmese military is deliberately
burning ethnic Rohingya villages near the Bangladesh border, Human Rights Watch
said today. Such acts of arson, after forcing residents to leave their
villages, appear central to the Burmese military’s ethnic cleansing campaign
against the Rohingya Muslim population in Burma’s Rakhine State.

Human Rights Watch released new satellite imagery and sensory data
showing that 62 villages in northern Rakhine State were targeted by arson
attacks between August 25 and September 14, 2017. Human Rights Watch identified
35 of these villages with extensive building destruction from very high
resolution satellite imagery, and an additional 26 villages that had active
fires detected in near-real time with environmental satellite sensors.

“Our field research backs what the
satellite imagery has indicated – that the Burmese military is directly
responsible for the mass burning of Rohingya villages in northern Rakhine
State,” said Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director. “The United Nations and member
countries should urgently impose measures on the Burmese government to stop
these atrocities and end the forced flight of Rohingya from Burma.”

Monday, September 18, 2017

The International Federation of
Journalists (IFJ) is deeply concerned over the detainment in Bangladesh of two
Myanmar photojournalists on charges “impersonation” and providing “false
information” and calls on the Bangladeshi authorities for their immediate
release and dropping of all charges.

The IFJ joins Myanmar Journalists’
Association (MJA) in also calling for the full engagement of Myanmar’s Ministry
of Information and Ministry of Foreign Affairs in negotiating their earliest
release.

Award-winning photojournalist Min Zayar Oo and his assistant, Hkun Lat,
who work for German magazine GEO, were accused of entering Bangladesh on
tourist visas instead of journalist visas, and reporting “fake news” and
arrested on September 7.

They have been denied bail and are in
detention. The photojournalists face up to seven years in jail if found guilty
of violating Bangladesh’s immigration laws. GEO had said its editorial board
was deeply concerned about the two journalists' continued detention.

YANGON — Headlines with prominent
references to “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing’ in Myanmar make veteran
journalist Daw Aye Aye Win uneasy, as she explains she feels international
media coverage about what is happening in northern Rakhine State fails to tell
the whole story of the crisis.

Currently, the region is reeling from Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army
(ARSA) attacks on 30 police outposts on Aug. 25 and subsequent violence
affecting civilians. The Myanmar government declared the Muslim militant group a
terrorist organization and has since begun “clearance operations” in the area,
leading to Buddhist Rakhine, self-identifying Rohingya Muslims and other
Rakhine sub-ethnicities to flee their homes.

Some of the nearly 400,000 Muslims
fleeing to Bangladesh have accused the army and ethnic Arakanese of killings,
rape and torching of their homes, while members of the 30,000 Arakanese and
other ethnic groups internally displaced have claimed they sought refuge
elsewhere for fear of attacks from Muslims, who are the majority in the area,
but a minority in the country.